Monthly Archives: September 2015

Persepolis

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Welcome back readers!

So this week in our ASTU class we’ve been reading and discussing the graphic memoir Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi.

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It is the auto biographical story of Satrapi’s life as a young girl growing up in Iran during and after the revolution in 1979. In the introduction Satrapi explains that one of her reasons for wanting to share her story is to show the world what life in Iran was like for her and her family, and to show people that the way her country has been perceived by the West is “far from the truth”.

Because Persepolis is “the story of a childhood” and not simply about war and terror, there are many experiences that Satrapi goes through that we can all relate to on some level. Some examples would be when she smokes her first cigarette to rebel agains her mother on page 117, or when she asks her parents to bring posters of her favorite musicians back from their vacation and hangs them up in her bedroom on pages 126-131. Although her experiences are different and generally far more extreme, we can all relate to listening to new music, falling in love with a new band or rebelling against our parents in one way or another. I think the fact that we can connect to Satrapi’s experiences makes her story even more powerful. It makes us stop and think about just how different we aren’t.

There was one passage in particular that really made me stop and think for a moment. On the bottom of page 52 we see a frame of Satrapi’s mother shouting “All torturers should be massacred!” and in the next frame we see a young Satrapi walking alone with the caption “My father was not a hero, my mother wanted to kill people… so I went out to play in the street”.

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This is a very extreme example, but it made me think about those moments that people always talk about when you see for the first time that your parents are actually people with lives outside of just being your mom and dad.

I personally can’t really remember that exact moment of realization in my life, so I looked around online for posts people have made about having that experience, and found this really cool blog post that I thought described what these frames made me think about really nicely. It’s called The First Time I Realized My Parents Were Human by Sherry Levine. She wrote “As people I realized, they must have regrets, insecurities and fears just like I do and will when I’m older. . . Between body changes, perception changes and new obstacles to face, every year to them is just as new as every year to us”.

Though having your mother express thoughts about wanted people to be killed is not the most common experience (I hope), I think everyone has these moments of “whoa, did my mom really just say that?!” or “my parents think that way?!” where it kind of occurs to you that they have this whole other side that you haven’t really seen or gotten to know yet, as your relationship hasn’t yet developed beyond parent and child.

Anyway, that’s just a thought I had while doing the reading this week! Hopefully some of you know the feeling I’m talking about.

Thanks for reading.

Olivea

 

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Hey guys, welcome to my blog!

As this is my first post, I’m going to go ahead and tell you a bit about myself before we get started. I’m from Albuquerque, New Mexico (any Breaking Bad fans out there?!) and I’m a first year at UBC. I’m in the Faculty of Arts, and I’m doing a specific program within that faculty called Global Citizens where I take a specific set of courses that not only relate very nicely to each other, but also specifically relate to and focus on the topic of global citizenship.

Now, I could go into what it means to me to be a global citizen, but I think a few of my classmates will cover that, so I’ll go ahead and get into the topic of academic writing, which is something we’ll be focusing on in this ASTU class (or arts studies seminar).

I have been writing research papers for a several years now, and of course, citing is a crucial component of this kind of writing. It’s something that my high school teachers made sure I knew how to do, but for the first time this week, we’ve learned a bit more about why citation is important. In high school we cited other authors to give our papers some depth and context (and to avoid plagiarism of course), but now I understand that there is a whole other component that I had never considered before.

Our text book Academic Writing an Introduction by Janet Giltrow, Richard Gooding, Daniel Burgoyne, and Marlene Sawatsky states that by citing the writer “gets to identify himself or herself as a member of the group collectively” as well as “take a turn in the conversation” and “report the current state of knowledge about the subject at hand” (28). In other words, as we have been discussing in class, we aren’t just throwing a few quotes into our papers in order to make them sound more intelligent, and to make people believe we actually know what we’re talking about, but we use the research of scholars in our writing to show the reader the “conversation” that has already been going on, and where we as authors can insert our own research and/or ideas.

In my last year of high school, I was required to write a twenty page thesis paper, and I chose the topic of body modification. Though I didn’t realize what I was doing at the time, I can now see how all of the quotes I used from the local tattoo artist, piercing master, and branding artist that I interviewed, along with the research done by experts on the topic, both pro and con, were creating an entire discussion around my argument, and supporting my contributions.

Anyway! I just thought this was a new and interesting insight into my own writing. Hopefully this post wasn’t too dry.

Thanks for reading my first ever blog post!

Olivea

Giltrow, Janet, et al. Academic Writing an Introduction. 3rd ed. Toronto: Broadview Press, 2014. Print.